Shining Force Ending

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Edomaden

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Published on May 24, 2023 11:14:28 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRJmLekWvl8

Game:

Shining Force (1992)

Duration: 9:31

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5

Ending 103
Shining Force: The Legacy of Great Intent
Developer: Sonic! Software Planning
Publisher: Sega
1992

Not many series can survive such a cataclysmic shift in style AND be successful in a way that Shining Force was. The first in the series was a first-person dungeon crawler in the vein of Wizardry or first Phantasy Star, a genre that designer Hiroyuki Takahashi loved playing. Shining Force explored another genre that was close to Takahashi's heart and that was turn-based strategy.
This game and this series as a whole really did a lot to fill in the deep hole Sega had made with RPG fans during the console wars. Let me take you back dear reader (I say literally because I think maybe one person reads these) to a time of blue genies and annoying talking parrots, when "Smells like Teen Spirit" was blasted every 10 minutes on the radio, 2Gs were all the rave in mobile phones if you were wealthy enough to have one and JPEGs were the hot new thing.
In 1992 during the peak of the console wars Tom Kalinske was president and CEO of Sega of America. A shrewd businessman, Tom saw the benefits in Sega's Motorola 68000 chip over Nintendo's S-CPU (5A22). The short of it is Sega had a wider data bus that could mimic 32-bit internal processing when handling 16-bit external data. This is one of the reasons Genesis became a chimera and the 32x was added on instead of getting a whole brand new system. The even SHORTER corporate answer Tom heard was "Sega go zoom zoom fast, Nintendo go poop poop slow" (actual corporate lingo).
Tom was the genius that marketed the "SEGA!" shout the Blast Processing campaigns that were pumped to compete against Nintendo. Sega at the time was geared towards the hormone-fisted male teenager who knew nothing but sports, speed, girls, fighting, and rad colors (it's the 90s), more sports, and goddammit, more speed! You want a fucking RPG?! Get that nerd shit out of here, go back to Nintendo with your slow turn-based nerd graphics. I don't see any fucking hedgehogs, neon, fists, girls, or sports in your nerd game....wow, really channeled that Sega boardroom for a second there. I should have bumped a line of coke to really get into character.
All joking aside, Tom did some great things for Sega and made the company a real player in America and a real competitor against Nintendo. They focused on action, platforming and sports at the cost of RPGs on the system. So for every Phantasy Star title there was a Super Hydlide out there and for every Shining Force there was a Dark Castle. You'd be hard pressed to even find a top 10 worst RPG list for the SEGA Genesis merely because you would be hard pressed to come up with 10 RPGs.
So I counted my blessing and rejoiced when I played Shining Force for the first time when I was young. I played it AFTER the sequel so it was a little stiff in my mind, because the best RPG on the Sega was the sequel hands down. This is where it all started for the turn-based strategy portion of the series. I highly recommend it.

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